Helsingin Sanomat: How we changed the newsroom for the future

When Erja Yläjärvi became Editor-in-Chief of Helsingin Sanomat in 2023, she initiated concrete structural, digital and cultural changes inside one of the Nordics’ leading newsrooms. Silos were dismantled. Teams were re-organized. New cross-functional ways of working were introduced. AI was implemented in parts of routine news production to free up time and resources for high-quality journalism.

All of this happened during extraordinary external pressure: war in a neighbouring country, economic uncertainty, and continued profitability demands from owners.

In this session, Yläjärvi will share the concrete decisions they made, how they re-organized the newsroom, how they introduced AI into daily workflows, what kind of resistance they encountered, and how they handled it. She will explain how they built new skills while maintaining production, what she changed in her own leadership role to make the transformation possible, and what she believes is essential - as both a leader and a colleague - to successfully drive change in a newsroom.